Stuck in Limbo
by Mekkinisms
Summary: The Doctor and Amy are enjoying a nice quiet morning when Captain Jack Harkness crosses their paths and turns everything upside down.
1. Chapter 1

AN: This story takes place after Cold Blood, so spoilers up to there. This is my first fic ever posted on , so enjoy!

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who or Torchwood. References to the technicalities of the TARDIS and space-time travel are from the Tardis Type 40 Handbook by Alastair Roberts.

Beta read by the awesome Aromene.

Please, please, please review!

Chapter 1

It was late morning on Ecklon; a small, emerald planet that orbited lazily around an ancient sun deep in the suburbs of the galaxy. The relatively obscure planet had only one little-known distinguishing feature: the best fruit in the Easter Spiral. Purple berries the size of your head and little ovular red fruits that tasted exactly like saltwater taffy. There were fuzzy orange things that had to be cut a specific way, otherwise the juice would explode like a sticky grenade, and every other colour fruit one could think of.

It was this delicious fruit that the Doctor and his pretty red-headed companion were currently partaking in as they leaned against a huge spiraling tree in a glade deep in the forests of Ecklon.

"Mmmm..." mumbled Amy, her mouth full, as she wiped fruit juice off her chin with the back of her hand, "Yoahwawigh."

"What?" he looked over with a puzzled expression.

She swallowed, "You. Were. Right. About the fruit."

"Aren't I always?" he asked with a grin.

She punched him in the shoulder playfully, "Shut up."

He looked at her as she giggled. She seemed so happy. But that's because she didn't remember, couldn't remember, what happened to Rory. Still, he thought she remembered somewhere deep inside. More than once the Doctor had found himself wandering the halls of the TARDIS as Amy slept and had heard quiet sobs that echoed off of every wall, like the entire ship was also weeping for the loss of Rory. He had never told her about the night-time crying, not about Rory. What was the point? The only thing left of him was a ring and the tears on Amy's pillow that she cried as she slept and dried to invisibility by morning.

And maybe it was better that way. Wouldn't it cause her more pain to mourn? Was it wrong of him to be glad that she couldn't remember the death of her fiance? Did that mean he was glad that Rory no longer existed? So many questions whirled rapidly around in his head, and no matter how long he thought about them he could not find any answers. He had 900 years of knowledge stored in his vast brain and the complexities of humans' relationships still manage to stump him. Maybe that's why he liked them so much. Another question.

But all he really wanted now was to make sure she was happy. Ever since the Silurian incident, he had taken her only to the safest and most enjoyable places in the hopes of restoring her good cheer and end the night time weeping. She wasn't even aware that she cried as she slept, but he knew, and it killed him.

It was his fault. Rory's death and subsequent erasing was his doing. As much as he tried to get around it, to explain and reason it away, he knew. He had so needed to satiate his curiosity, to reach into the rift and see what was on the other side, instead of getting on the TARDIS and disappearing into the ether before one of those damned lizards could shoot anybody. If they simply left instead of humouring his whims? The Doctor didn't like "what ifs" as a rule, but this one plagued him.

He tried to shake off the gloom his brooding had caused and return to the trivial realities of this harmless little planet before Amy could realize where his head had gone.

"Nobody knows about this place because the local people refuse to trade or make contact with any other species. They are one of the most peaceful races in the galaxy and they don't want to be 'contaminated' by more violent peoples. But I understand that they said it very politely." Facts. They were an easy screen, a mirror to deflect attention from where his head really was.

"So they never get angry? Ever?"

Up in the treetops came the echoing calls of wildlife. Together the different noises made a symphony of the jungle, intertwining croaks and long low notes with shrill high vibratos and the melodies of mating calls.

The Doctor chuckled, "Well there was one time. It was the only time in history that the Ecklon people have ever tried to kill someone."

"What happened?"

Under the calls of wildlife a distant roar began to build, like the feedback on a radio, something so subtle it was easily dismissed.

"He blew up their moon." The roar began to slowly increase, accompanied by a nearby rustling in the foliage. The Doctor drew his brows together in puzzlement as he listened. It sounded like something was running towards them, followed by a large crowd of some sort. That was odd. The crowd didn't sound happy.

The rustling increased in proximity until it was almost upon them, "Who managed to blow up a moon?" the oblivious Amy asked incredulously.

At that moment a man in a navy coat and an unbuttoned shirt burst into the the clearing. He stopped short at the sight of the two lounging peacefully in the glen and grinned a roguish, dimpled grin, "Doctor."

"Captain Jack Harkness."

The handsome stranger gave a worried backward glance as the roar increased and clarified into the sounds of breaking brush and angry yelling. He looked back a the two, panicked, "You might want to run."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The door to the TARDIS shut just in time. Outside the Ecklon people hammered on the blue box, filled with an uncharacteristic rage.

"Amy, Jack, brace the door while I get us out of here!" The lanky alien raced over to his circular panel of controls.

Both of his passengers pushed their bodies against the inside of the door as it thumped. Amy glared at the stranger next to her. She yelled over the noise of the death threats from outside the box. "What did you do? Blow up another one of their moons?"

"Ecklon only had one moon," Jack yelled back.

"Then what the hell did you do?"

The Doctor finally managed to start the familiar sound of the TARDIS takeoff. He gave a sigh of relief and relaxed against the railing around the controls. "We're safe."

He had spoken too soon. As they began to fade out of their current existence on the planet, the TARDIS shuddered and stopped suddenly. All the occupants of the vessel were knocked off their feet by the momentum at the exact moment that the entire ship went completely dark.

From deep in the dark, the Doctor's voice echoed off the cavernous inside of the TARDIS, "That can't be good."

"Yes," said Amy, rising to her hands and knees and attempting to find the railing next her, "thank you for that stunning observation, Doctor." It was nearly pitch dark, so much so that closing her eyes seemed to have no impact on what she was seeing. Her hand found something. But it wasn't a metal railing. It was warm and chiseled and undulating with the in and out of Captain Harkness's breath. She snatched her hand away from Jack's chest as if scalded. "Sorry," she said quietly.

He chuckled. "Second base already? Dinner and movie first, gorgeous."

"Put some clothes on." she snapped.

Amy didn't view herself as the kind of person to judge people quickly but in the first five minute of knowing this American man she had decided that she disliked him. Part of that was the fact that his entrance had immediately preceded, and seemed to be the originating cause, of a disaster of increasingly dire proportions, but the rest was the mixture of over-confidence and flirtatiousness that anyone could tell him was strictly Amy's department.

She finally located the lovely, solid, not-a-half-naked-man's-chest railing and pulled herself to her feet. Slowly she made it up the the control deck. She could see a few faint lights still glowing on the panel of time travel instruments and took that as a good sign. She tried to make a mental list of reasons they were going to be fine: Not dead yet. Check. Flashy lights on the thingamabobers. Check. Doctor here. Check. That was about as far as she got before the Doctor began to whirl around, adjusting Boringers and tabulating Time Indexes and doing about a dozen other things Amy had never cared to learn about.

"Doctor, are we alright?"

The Doctor looked at the screen and Amy could see in the dim glow a frown form in the shadows of his face, "It appears that Jack's friends-"

"Not my friends," interject a voice, "definitely not my friends."

"Oh good. So you didn't sleep with them?" the Doctor asked snappishly.

There was a long pause, "Well, not all of them."

"The point is, they seem to have managed to knock us off course, I'm not quite sure how yet. I should be able to get us out shortly, but I'll need to get the TARDIS up and running to see what we're dealing with. I'll need some time. Meanwhile, maybe the honourable Captain Harkness can inform us how the Ecklons, a relatively primitive race of people, managed to get a hold of technology so advanced it knocked a time machine off it's path!" the Doctor was irritated. Rarely did the Doctor ever work himself up into actual irritation. Whatever their history, Amy felt confident in assuming it hadn't all been good.

Another long awkward silence echoed loudly in the TARDIS, "I have a feeling there's no right answer to that question."

"Of all the stupid things you've said so far, Jack, that was probably the most intelligent. Now if you kindly shut up while I try to get the TARDIS active again, thank you." The sounds of the Doctor shuffling were followed by that of a drawer somewhere opening. He rummaged through until he felt the heavy cylindrical weight of a torch. He held in upwards under his face and clicked it on, "Knew I had one of these things somewhere." Torch in hand, he began to fuss with the control panel, occasionally giving it percussive readjustments via a mallet.

After about five minutes the lights in the TARDIS quietly flickered to life, and with it the customary whirling and beeping of the controls. Amy breathed a sigh of relief. They could get out of wherever they were stuck now. She watched the Doctor closely as he attempted to calibrate the scanner, but the jubilation she expected to see was absent. He appeared even more distraught than before.

"No, no, no, no," he brushed back his hair anxiously and he studied the scanner carefully before frantically typing away.

Jack finally got up from the seated position he had maintained during the blackout and buttoning up his shirt, he walked over behind the Doctor to peer at the screen.

"What is it, Doctor?"

The Doctor finally detached himself from the keyboard and took a few steps back in defeat and panic. The scanner wasn't malfunctioning and it's readings were triple checked for accuracy. He ran both his hands through his hair again for good measure as he stared desperately at the readings, "The Ecklons appear to have somehow interfered with several of the TARDIS's key components, including the dimensional transducer. We're stuck on the edge of the space-time vortex."

Fear began to seep into Amy's veins like an icy chill, "Doctor, what does that mean exactly?"

"We're outside of every dimension." he looked at her, panic clearly written in his eyes, "We're nowhere. We exist nowhere. And it's going to tear the TARDIS apart."


	3. Chapter 3

"Nowhere, stuck in nowhere; well, that's not fair. We're not somewhere, but we are between somewheres."

"You're doing that thing again, Doctor." sighed Amy.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you don't make sense!"

"Right. The space between dimensions is called limbo. When we travel, we go through the space-time vortex and then sort of pop out the other side into some place new. In order to make that happen, the TARDIS makes a sort of hole in the limbo to slip in between real space and the space-time vortex. With me so far?"

"I think so."

"Well the thingy that's supposed to make the hole stopped working half way through for some strange reason," the Doctor gave the lounging Jack a pointed glare, "and the limbo closed up around us. So we're currently between dimensions."

"Through no direct fault of my own, may I add." inserted Jack

"But you can get us out?"

The Doctor stopped his ceaseless tinkering the second he heard the anxiety in his companion's voice. He gave Amy his most grave and sincere gaze. Amy loved those intense looks as much as she hated them. It always seemed like he was searching for something when her looked at her and she always worried nonsensically that he wouldn't find whatever it was he was looking for in her and he would be disappointed. "Once I fix the dimensional transducer-"

"The limbo hole making thing?"

"Yes. Once I fix that, we will be fine."

"And you can do that?"

"Yes. Of course I can. But I'll need your help. I need you to check the TARDIS for any rooms where the lights aren't functioning properly. We need to make sure that none of her circuitry is damaged."

Amy hesitated for a moment but then ran off to follow the Doctors bidding. The Doctor followed her with his eyes until she was out of the room and then slumped against the control panel. He let his thoughts chase each other around his head as he toyed with his bow tie. He had made a promise to himself and to Rory that he would take care of Amy. He thought he could do that if she stayed with him, but clearly even the safest reaches of the universe had it out for him. Maybe, if they made it through this, he should just send her home...

"So what are our chances?"

The Doctor started wildly. Lost in his brooding, he had forgotten that Jack, the immortal thorn in his side, was still there. "Don't do that!"

"Don't do what?"

"Don't lurk like that. It's unsettling. Besides. I told you, we're going to be fine."

"No, that's what you told your pretty friend. You're keeping something from us, I can tell. I was a time agent, you know. I know about time...stuff. Even if I can't remember any of it."

"Yes, well that's not really out of the ordinary for you, is it?" The Doctor sighed heavily. "The TARDIS is powered by a link to the space-time continuum. No space or time means no power source. The TARDIS has some reserves, but we're going to run out fairly quickly."

"And we're not going to be able to use the transducer without a fairly large power supply."

"Exactly. So until I can come up with a brilliant solution, will you please go keep an eye on Amy?"

"Exciting assignment. I get it, I get it, you don't need me or her getting in your way. Don't worry, I'll figure out some way to keep us entertained." he winked roguishly and exited up the stairs.

The Doctor gave a long suffering sigh, he had been doing a lot of sighing of late, and pulled out his sonic screwdriver, ready to get to work dismantling panels in order to located the transducer. He trusted Jack with his life, but he wasn't sure he trusted him with his companions. His brilliant smile, vivacious personality and Olympic level flirting abilities tended to make them all quite silly. Personally, he could never understand why; Captain Jack Harkness wasn't even a real captain. "Should have thrown him out of the ship the second I met him," he muttered, "would have saved everyone a lot of trouble."


	4. Chapter 4

Amy was sitting in one of the TARDIS's many passages, leaning against the wall, when she heard him approach. She knew it was Jack because his footsteps were almost foreign to her. The Doctor's habit of dashing from one place to the next had become so familiar to her that the stranger's slower and heavier stride seemed almost jarring, echoing the way it was against the metallic floors. He turned the corner and paused when he spotted her.

"Aren't you supposed to be checking lights?" He asked with a grin, leaning nonchalantly against the TARDIS wall.

"That's a joke and we both know it," her gut wrenched the same way it had when her Doctor had first fed her the line about checking circuitry. She was stupid for fooling herself into thinking that she was useful, essential even; right now she was nothing but dead weight, "He sent you to look after me, didn't he?"

Jack shrugged, "I think he just wanted to get rid of me to tell you the truth."

"Then I suppose we're in the same boat."

"Yes, except I think the Doctor likes you better."

"How do you know him?" Amy asked, "Are you an alien as well? You don't look like an alien, you look more like one of those war reenactment people. Is that it? Or are you really from the past, like the real World War II?"

Jack smoothed out his signature blue coat, circa 1940, and chuckled, "Close. I'm from the future, but I did do a brief stint in World War II, that's actually where I first met the Doctor."

"And you just decided never to update your wardrobe?"

"Hey! This is a good look for me. And besides, everyone loves a man in uniform." he winked and she couldn't help but giggle at his complete irascibility.

He closed the distance between them with an easy walk and mimicked her seated position, "I'm not sure we were ever properly introduced. Captain Jack Harkness," he held out his hand.

"So I gathered. Amy, Amy Pond," she took his hand and gave it a firm shake.

"So what about you?"

"What about me what?"

"How did you meet our esteemed Doctor?"

She sighed, "I met him when I was a little girl, but he disappeared after crashing in our garden one night and eating all of our fish sticks and custard. I waited years for him to show up again. One day he did, and he did the whole saving the world bit, and two years later we were off."

"Two years later?" Jack asked, confused.

"It was complicated."

"It always is with the Doctor."

The was a long pause, pregnant with recollections from both parties of their separate strange adventures with the unfathomable Doctor. Amy, unwilling to sink back into self pitying silence, changed tacks.

"So you traveled with the Doctor?"

"Yes, a couple times."

"Why did you stop? Why would you ever stop? With him you can have all of time and space, why would you ever give that up?" Amy's eagerness was apparent. She couldn't fathom anyone willingly leaving the Doctor for any reason.

"I had people who were counting on me back on Earth. People I loved."

Something like guilt twinged in Amy. Didn't she have someone waiting for her at home? She tried to think. No. Her aunt had passed and she had...nobody. The feeling slipped away like a forgotten dream.

"Where are they now then?"

Jack shut down, like someone had flipped a switch, "Dead," he said dully, his eyes dark. There was more silence and Jack looked away, unwilling to admit how fresh the pain still was.

Amy struggled to the think of the right thing to say. 'I'm sorry'; but no, those were definitely not the right words, but she couldn't think of anything better.

Jack remained pensive for a few moments and then hopped to his feet, "Yeah. I guess I better go check on those lights."

He exited as quickly as he could, turning the corner and beginning to perfunctorily check for power in each room he came across. People died around him, that was a given. He was immortal. But losing Ianto, Tosh, Owen, and his own grandson in such a short space of time had been unbearable. His own daughter would never forgive him; hell, he would never forgive himself. He had loved them and they had died for him. His guilt had been his only constant companion as he wandered the stars and bars trying so desperately to forget.

Almost as if on cue, he thought he saw a memory out of the corner of his eye. Blonde, smiling, wearing a Union Jack shirt. Rose. But that was impossible. He turned towards her, but she was gone. Behind him he heard the distant sound of running. Jack turned around again, only to see what appeared to be the Doctor in his previous regeneration running straight at him. The Doctor was muted, the footsteps that had sounded far away were quite close, only a few feet away and somehow he wasn't quite right. Not only in that this Doctor didn't exist anymore, but because he was slightly transparent and seemed to flicker, like the static on a television set. He barely had time to react before the Doctor ran straight through him and vanished without a noise.

Jack paused for only a second before running back down the hall. "Doctor!"

The Doctor was making the most of his time alone with the TARDIS. He had removed several panels on various parts of the console and multicolored wires spewed from the gaps like they were trying to escape. He had his spiffy goggles on and was currently bent over a particularly complicated snarl of wires. "One of these," he muttered, "has got to lead to the transducer."

He whipped out his sonic screwdriver and began scanning them all until he found the correct one. "Ah ha!" he yelled in triumph as he used the screwdriver to follow the invisible path of the wire to the trunk of the central column below the clear platform. There he found a rather large panel that was easily opened with a little sonic nudge. Inside was a tiny, dimly glowing cube, about two inches square and surrounded by all sorts of circuitry that plugged into it.

"That's it?" the Doctor mused as he lifted the broken component from it's place, "It's so small!"

He had never had reason to bother with the transducer before. It was one of the most stable pieces of equipment on the TARDIS. It never broke and never failed. Well, before now.

The Doctor disentangled the cube from the wiring and carried it back up to the main control panel. "Let's see if we can get you jump started," he cooed to the thing as he cradled it in his hands. He improvised with some of the "extraneous" wiring that had somehow managed not to fit back into the system after he had dismantled the wires in several of the control panels and it seemed to work to the Doctor's satisfaction. There was still the problem of power, though.

He had considered recycling some rooms of the TARDIS for a boost, but from what he understood of her technology, the essential components still needed the chronon and huon particle infused energy that came solely from the TARDIS's matrix. The Doctor stepped back from the dimensional transducer and tried to think. There had to be a way out, there always had before. He knew it was faulty logic, but it was the kind of logic that seemed to keep him alive, and so he clung to it.

Something flickered in and out of existence so quickly he almost didn't catch it. Odd. Then a young Sarah Jane was standing next to him, talking silently and animatedly for two seconds before she too, blinked out. Worrisome. For a moment the Doctor thought he saw his old control room like a fine mist, almost translucent, overlapping his newer, shinier, most definitely real-er one. Bad. The Doctor dashed to a screen which displayed several vital outputs and scanned it hastily. What he saw was not good. He started to run in the same direction Amy and Jack had disappeared. "Jack! Amy!"

The Doctor and Jack met up at an intersection, nearly colliding.

"Doctor," Jack gasped, grabbing onto him, "I saw-"

"I know," replied the Doctor, "we have to find Amy."

Jack indicated the way and they both ran until they saw her at the end of a corridor. She was standing with their back to them and staring at someone with tears flooding down her cheeks. The apparition was, like the others had been, slightly transparent and occasionally flickering, but his features were clear. He was thin, with a bit of a beaky nose, mournful eyes and a mess of blonde hair. He didn't do anything, he just stood there and stared like he could see them before apologetically fading away.

The Doctor and Jack stopped a few feet away from Amy. She turned to them, sobbing, "Doctor, who was that? And why am I crying?" she began to crumple, but the Doctor caught her in his arms and held her to him as the tears continued, "Why am I crying?"

The Doctor said nothing. He just held her as tight as he could.


End file.
